


I'm shipping off to Boston - to find my wooden leg

by Gweiddi_at_Ecate



Series: Rex quondam, rexque futurus [2]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, F/M, Gen, Reincarnation, Shotgun Wedding, Teen Pregnancy, Unplanned Pregnancy, talk of miscarriage
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-11
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-06-08 22:32:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15253500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gweiddi_at_Ecate/pseuds/Gweiddi_at_Ecate
Summary: The Boston spin-off of my fan fictionAppel du Vide.In which a city soothes old wounds and creates new ones.





	1. Hymn for the Missing

**Author's Note:**

> I _did_ say I was going to write something about Arthur and Morgana in Boston.  
>  I guess I'm just really frustrated right now because I can concentrate neither on my thesis nor on my Reylo fan fictions, and Arthur and Morgana make me feel at home, if only a little bit.  
> Updates will be _very_ whimsical, depending on my time, energy and inspiration. The chapters will not be in any chronological order. Tags and warnings will be added as I update.  
>  The title of the story comes from [I'm Shipping Up To Boston - Dropkick Murphys](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-64CaD8GXw)
> 
> As always, I don't own anything, especially not the English language. It's rather the other way around: I just submit to it and pray I don't mess up too much with my Italian intrusive thoughts.  
> Also, I'm struggling to use an American orthography in these chapters for the sake of the setting but God, it's driving me crazy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This first piece takes place right where [Chapter VI: The Missing Side of the Coin](http://archiveofourown.org/works/13143918/chapters/30984606) ended.  
> The title of the chapter comes from [Hymn For The Missing - RED](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWEsrQx6A2U).

Arthur put down the telephone and sighed.

He looked at Morgana’s head, at the flowing cascade of her dark and grey hair.

He went back to her. She was cold and unmoving in her armchair.

He didn’t even try to lift her up: Arthur sat back on the couch and took her rigid hand in his.

Morgana had always had cold hands. He could almost pretend the icy halo of her skin was normal.

Almost.

He knew it wasn’t.

He was an idiot.

His body started quivering. Before he realized it, Arthur was shaking violently and sobbing, his free hand trying to stop the tears from flowing, the other one still clutching Morgana’s hand in utmost desperation.

He couldn’t tell exactly when, but he heard the doorbell ringing after some time. Maybe hours, maybe minutes. He heard the doorbell ringing, and fists knocking, and Nora’s careful voice calling him from beyond the wooden barrier.

Arthur didn’t know how to answer. He held Morgana’s hand more tightly and pressed his fingers against his eyes. He tried to dry his face.

There was the metallic click of keys trying to fit into the keyhole, but Arthur had changed the locks a couple of weeks before, choosing a more secure mechanism after the wave of burglaries that had hit the neighborhood. He still hadn’t given Ywain the new set of keys. He thought Morgana had done it, but maybe not. Maybe she had forgotten.

“ _Da? Da, for Christ’s sake, open the goddamned door!_ ”

She had been forgetting many things, lately. She had told him that there wasn’t enough space in her head for the tumor _and_ her thoughts. Then she had apologized for being so morbid.

But maybe she had remembered to give their son the keys, though, because Arthur thought he heard Nora talking, more metallic clicking, and then the sound of footsteps on the creaking wooden tiles in the hallway.

By the time they got to the sitting room, Arthur had managed to control his breathing, and he was now crying silently, only hot tears and slow inhaling.

“Arthur, you… ah!” Nora gasped, covering her mouth with her hands.

Ywain blanched. He approached carefully, called him with a quiet voice.

“Da, let go of her hand.”

“I can’t leave her.”

“Mom’s not here anymore.”

Yeah. Yeah, he was right. She was not. There was just an empty shell sitting next to him. But Arthur still couldn’t bring himself to let go of her hand.

“I don’t _want_ to leave her,” he said.

Ywain knelt in front of him and placed his hand – his warm, living hand – on Arthur’s.

“She left first. Come on, Da, let go.”

Arthur looked at his son. He took in his angry, burning eyes. Ywain had always done that: turning worry and pain into anger. It was something he had inherited from Morgana. They were both terrible at dealing with heartbreak, so they rather decided to feel fury, to channel all their grief and fear into hatred.

Arthur swallowed. His fingers were shaking and the only thing keeping him in one piece was Ywain’s own hand.

“She didn’t want to leave. She tried to stay here.”

Ywain sighed.

“I know, Da. I know. But now she’s gone.”

“I wanted to call the– but I don’t know if I can.”

“I can do it, Arthur,” Nora stepped in. “Don’t worry, we’ll… we’ll take care of it. We’ll take care of everything.”

Arthur raised his head and smiled weakly at his son’s wife.

“She told me to give you her necklace, the one you like. She wanted you to have it.”

“That was very kind.”

“Yes, she is kind.”

“Da. Da, come on, get up. Come home with us.”

“Can I stay with her a little more?”

“No. You’ve been with Ma your whole life. Now you should come with us.”

“Okay. I… I guess I should.”

“Yeah, you should.”


	2. Young God

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this because life is reaching new levels of shit, I can't focus on anything, surely not my thesis, and Star Wars fan fictions are _hard_ but Arthur and Morgana are always home to me.  
>  The title comes from [Young God](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUhJRQSs6UQ) by Halsey.

As much as he loved her, Arthur hadn’t understood the lengths of Morgana’s loyalty until Versailles.

He would never forget how she had stolen the goblet from his hand and laughed playfully.

“ _I think I should be the most honoured_ ,” she had said, and he had caught an incomprehensible determination in her glance as she had looked at her husband straight in the eye.

“ _The king is dead,_ ” she had declared. “ _Long live the king._ ”

And she had downed Arthur’s wine with a victorious, terrifying smile.

She was still laughing, and her husband was still yelling with rage when she had started choking because of the poison meant for Arthur.

Morgana was the one with magic. She was the one who knew how to heal. Arthur… he was just a man who had developed a lot of ruthless enemies in a very short period of time.

He’d had to watch her die, powerless, for hours.

Arthur was thinking about it, lying on his bed and still awake at two in the morning.

He had never remembered quite so late in life and he wondered if it was a curse or a blessing. A little part of him wished he had never remembered at all: he was living a good life, his folks were nice people, he liked working in the garage with his old man, and Morgana was right next door and they had grown up together, and things were just generally fine. He didn’t know there were people missing from his life, didn’t know how a man stank of blood and shite when he died.

Now, though? Well, now he had no idea where his friends were, if Guinevere and Lancelot had found each other. If Merlin was doing fine.

And the nightmares were back. Morgana’s had never left, but at least she had been able to write them down as the product of her fantasy rather than of memories stuck so deep in her soul not even death and rebirth could erase them. Arthur was experiencing his fair share of night terrors too. He knew from his previous lives that it wasn’t going to last, that in a few months the adrenaline and the shock were going to die out and let him sleep in peace, but for the moment bad memories and livid ghosts it was. And the face of his sister as the poison burned her guts from the inside.

Gods above, she had known. She had known there was poison in that goblet, she had known it was gonna kill her, and if Arthur had any inkling of the woman Morgana was, then she had surely known what kind of poison was in the goblet and what it would do to her. And she had drunk it anyway.

Arthur closed his hand in a fist and opened it again. Closed it. Opened it.

She had also saved his hand during the War. Saved his life too.

He sighed.

It was proving quite difficult to reconcile the memory of the angry, passionate woman he had known for centuries with the image of the little girl with pigtails and mud on her knees Arthur had grown up with. A part of his mind was telling him Morgana was royalty – that Arthur himself was. Fucking King That Was Promised and all that shit – and another was reminding him of the weekend after Easter, when he had covered for her with her father while she had gone to some shady club in the city with her last fling. Because this Morgana, the one who wore paisley shirts and listened to The Weavers with him in the secrecy of Arthur’s basement, was a carefree girl whose most terrible drama had been hiding hickeys with a silk scarf so that her folks wouldn’t give her beef. This Morgana didn’t have to worry about surviving plots and treachery and didn’t have to bear the weight of Avalon on her shoulders.

Arthur would have wanted her to keep living their quiet, ordinary life as long as possible.

He groaned and turned on his side, punching the pillow for good measure.

He really needed to sleep. He needed it, and he was almost getting there, in that cottony zone where your brain zones out and you know you’re falling asleep, when a clack against his window startled him.

Arthur frowned and looked around, feeling a little lost. Then the click-clack resumed and he jumped down his bed to look out of the window.

Morgana was standing in his garden, a handful of pebbles in her hand, wearing only her pajamas and a thick shawl around her shoulders.

“Morgana, seriously, what the hell?” he whispered just loud enough so she could hear him or at least guess what he was saying.

“Come down, Ken doll,” she called.

Arthur scowled, but he still took his sweater from his chair and put it on as he silently went down the stairs, skipping the third step that always creaked when you walked on it.

Morgana was waiting for him in the back garden, still standing right under his window. She had thrown the pebbles on the grass and was playing with them with the tip of her bare foot.

She looked ghastly.

“Arthur, do you… can we talk?” she murmured breathlessly.

He took her face in his hands and studied it under the wan moonlight. Her eyes were bloodshot and her cheeks were blotched with tear trails.

“Are you blitzed?”

Morgana scoffed and moved away. “I wish.”

He hummed critically and pointed to the porch swing with his thumb. They had sat there many times, drinking strawberry lemonade and talking about everything, telling each other’s secrets. It seemed like a good idea, to sit on the swing and rock back and forth while they – _Morgana_ – spilled their guts out; but she shook her head and gestured to the window of his parents’ bedroom.

“I… I can’t risk they hear me,” she stuttered. She was shaking faintly and held the seams of her shawl tighter in her fists.

“Okay. Okay. So we’ll just… let’s sit under the tree, yeah?” Arthur bit down the urge to shake her shoulders and just ask her what the hell had happened to her, but he forced himself to keep calm. Pressuring Morgana was never a good idea, especially when she was already upset. So they sat on their spot under the magnolia tree, where they had learned to play cards when they were children and had eaten so many cookies they had made themselves sick.

With the tree trunk scratching against their backs, Morgana looked at him, obviously trying to speak, but her voice died in her throat with a pained gasp. She folded her legs against her chest and hugged her knees.

“Can you… can you just hold me for a moment?”

That was when Arthur really started to worry: Morgana didn’t like to be touched when she was distressed, so for her to _ask_ to be touched it meant that something had gone gigantically wrong.

He threw his arms around Morgana’s thin shoulders and kissed her forehead.

“Baby, what happened?” he asked before he could help himself. He immediately winced.

“Arthur Pendragon, call me that again and I swear you will regret it,” Morgana seethed right on cue.

He snorted. “Sorry. It’s not easy to let go of the habit.”

“It’s been a month, Arthur. You can admit you keep doing it just to spite me.”

“As I said, it’s not easy to let go of the habit.”

She frowned and shut her eyes, taking a deep breath. A nervous tear escaped from her closed eyelids and she sniffled.

“Arthur… I’m pregnant.”

“You’re what?”

“I’m pregnant,” she wheezed. “I’m pregnant and I don’t know what to do.”

She rested her chin on her folded arms and stared forward at the white porch and the pots of plants that his mother had put all around the house. Pretty, useless plants that served only for decoration. Not the type of herbs and flowers that Gaius used to keep around.

“Well, you–” Arthur chewed his lip remorsefully “–damn, you should tell the father. You need to decide what to do together.”

Morgana scoffed. “Yeah, fat chance.”

“Why?”

Morgana simply _looked_ at him and Arthur groaned in understanding.

“Please, don’t tell me it’s Cole’s. Please, not that jerk. Anyone but him,” he begged.

“I thought he cared for me. Now I wish I hadn’t been so stupid,” she huffed, her upper lip curled up in a bitter snarl.

“You are eighteen, Morgana. You can be excused for being stupid. You didn’t know any better.”

“I _was_ eighteen. Now I’m several hundred years old, and I can tell that IIwas so, so _stupid_!” her voice cracked and she put her hands on her face to hide the tears.

Arthur held her head against his chest and rubbed soothing circles on her back.

“Come on, babe, we’re gonna figure this out.”

“How? Cole left without a word and now there’s this baby… my father is going to kill me!”

He could almost laugh at the irony: Morgana kept saying _he_ had issues with fathers, but it wasn’t like she was any better.

He tried to calm her down, “He’ll be angry, alright, but he is certainly not going to kill you. If he ever finds Cole, though, now that’s another kettle of fish.”

“No, Arthur, he will be furious. He has always expected so much from me and now I just go on and get knocked up by a good-for-nothing and–”

Arthur couldn’t stand the desperation and self-pity in her voice.

“What if it wasn’t a good-for-nothing?” he stopped her.

Morgana let out a skeptical scoff, “Oh, I am under no illusion that Cole is anything but.”

“Yes, but your father doesn’t know you were seeing him, right?” he argued.

“Of course not. He would have chased Cole with his shotgun if he had known anything about it.”

Which, in hindsight, wouldn’t have been too bad, Arthur thought. He had just enough mercy and sense of self-preservation to avoid saying that aloud. He was pretty sure Morgana could already guess he was thinking it, anyway.

“Then he’ll never know. You just need to tell him someone else is the father, someone who will be here to take responsibility for his actions.”

Morgana chuckled mirthlessly, “And who, pray tell, would be willing to sacrifice himself at this altar?”

Arthur shrugged.

“Me.”

She cocked her eyebrows, incredulous.

“Arthur, this is serious. You can’t… we can’t just marry and pretend the baby is yours.”

“Why?”

Morgana huffed impatiently. “Because… what if Merlin shows up? What if… what if one day you look across the street and Gwen is there, uh?”

“It won’t happen.”

“You cannot know.”

“We’re eighteen and we still haven’t met any of them. We’re on our own this time, Morgana. It’s just us, and I’m not leaving you alone to face this,” he said, braving her terror as calmly as he could.

“I could still lose the baby.”

“You could,” he acquiesced.

“First pregnancies are always an uncertainty and–”

“How far along are you?”

“Three months, give or take.”

“You won’t lose the baby.”

“I still could. And then what? We fake some fault so we can get a divorce? Our parents would never forgive us. I can’t… I can’t put you through this kind of shit.”

“You won’t put me through anything. I’m offering, okay? We get married, have this baby and raise him together. Or raise her. Him or her. It will be fine.”

“You don’t know it. You don’t know it! Something could happen. I’m past the first trimester, but I could still have a miscarriage.” She rubbed a panicked hand on her belly, her fingers digging in the soft fabric of her pajamas. “I could still…”

Arthur grimaced. He felt bad already, but he had to ask.

“Morgana, do you _want_ to lose the baby?”

She stiffened, and after a tremulous intake of breath, she laughed.

“Honestly? No. I didn’t want this child. I kept telling myself that my period was just late, I prayed to the Goddess that she would help me this one time. Just this one fucking time!” she cried, blinking away her tears. Arthur couldn’t tell if they were falling out of anger or despair.

She took a deep breath. She was shaking again and he fought the urge to hug her, to shield her. He let her be, giving her the space she needed.

Morgana resumed, “But now it’s here and…”

“You want it.”

“No. I still don’t want it. What I want is to find a job. Get a house. Get a litter of cats and live in my fucking home and become the weird old spinster of the neighborhood.”

Arthur chuckled. Yeah, he knew of her plans. He used to think Morgana could be happy like that, but it was before they remembered. He wasn’t so sure about that now. However, if she needed to cling to the idea a while longer, he wouldn’t say a word.

Morgana sighed.

“I suppose that’s all going in the trash now. As much as I didn’t want this baby or any baby, I don’t want to lose it either.”

Arthur hummed. He scratched his chin and smiled kindly.

“I mean, you can still get a job after the baby is born. Maybe you should rethink the litter of cats, though. My brother David and his wife had five. You know, back before the War,” he explained, “and their house was a total mess. I don’t think you could live with that.”

“I suppose three would be enough,” she reasoned.

“Good. Three cats then. At what time will your father be back from work?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Five?”

Arthur nodded, thoughtful. He considered the cars they still had to fix, factored in the jobs that might come during the day. “Five. I can be home from the garage by six. Get punched in the face by six thirty.”

Morgana whimpered. She put her hands in her hair and groaned, “Are we really doing this?”

“I think we are, baby.”

She scowled but she didn’t comment on the pet name.

He grinned. Seeing she looked a tad calmer, he put his arm around her shoulder and kissed the crown of her head. “I guess we really are.”

Morgana shook her head. “Arthur, I don’t think I can make you happy.”

“I don’t care about happy,” he said. “I’d just like… I’d just like it to be peaceful.”

“Okay,” she whispered. “I think I can manage that.”

He smiled. “Thanks.”

Morgana cackled. “You thank me?”

“Yeah. Why not?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I called the scumbag sperm donor Cole because it was the best I could come up with that sounded a bit like Accolon, one of Morgana's lovers in the Arthurian myths.  
> Yes, Morgana's American father totally owned a shotgun. More than one, to be precise, because he went hunting for sport, usually with Arthur's father and a couple of other friends.  
> Also, I might be wrong but I think divorce without fault was still illegal in Massachusetts before 1967, and this chapter is set in August 1965. Arthur and Morgana are going to marry within the year.


End file.
